Our co-organiser Dr. Marina Gerber has published a review of Alexander Kluge’s book Russia Container (2022) entitled „Containing Russia“ in the autumn issue of the online journal Radical Philosophy. The full review can be read or downloaded from the journal’s website.
Containing Russia
Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it ‘on commission’ by his sister Alexandra Kluge, who, unlike her brother, lived in the German Democratic Republic after the separation of their parents. There Alexandra learnt Russian at school and read Pushkin as well as Russian fairy tales. After her death in 2017 Kluge collected some of her stories about Russia together with other (former East) German stories. The book shows the romantic feeling that East Germans had, and still have, for Russia. It also demonstrates how these passions spilt over to the ‘western’ part of Germany, or at least to Kluge himself. But the romanticism of the book is not one of exalted ideas of a nation or state, but rather of the individual human experience, which is in a fundamental conflict with abstract ideas and which tries to resist them.
Read more: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/containing-russia
Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). https://www.seagullbooks.org/russia-container/
Decolonize Eastern Europe! 